What Pod Monster reads
The long version of what the landing page introduces: where each one comes from in a feed, and how much of it a player is expected to show.
The chapters the creator intended
Chapters are older than podcasting itself. Apple built them for QuickTime in the mid-90s, then reused the format for audiobooks (M4B) and podcasts (M4A/AAC) when iTunes 4.9 shipped in June 2005. That December, ID3 gained chapters, bringing them to MP3 — though Apple didn't display those until around 2018.
Everything since has moved chapters out of the file and into the feed. Podlove Simple Chapters arrived in 2009 as an RSS extension, and stayed common in European shows; Podcasting 2.0 proposed podcast:chapters JSON in 2020, which Apple began ingesting with iOS 26.2 in December 2025.
Every app supports a different slice of that history, and some now generate chapters over the top of the ones a show wrote. Pod Monster reads the creator's chapters, keeps art and titles intact, and caches them with a download so the list works offline. Any autogeneration of chapters that's done in the future will only be for episodes with none.
| Chapter format | Where it lives | Since | Pod Monster | Apple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MP4 / M4B chapters | Inside the AAC or MP4 file | 2004 | no | yes |
| MP3 / ID3 chapters | Inside the MP3 file | 2005 | yes | yes |
| Vorbis chapters | Inside the Ogg, Opus or FLAC file | no single date | no | no |
| Podlove Simple Chapters | In the RSS feed | 2009 | yes | no |
| podcast:chapters (JSON) | In the RSS feed | 2020 | yes | yes |
| Timestamps in the notes | In the episode description | no single date | yes | yes |
| Auto-generated | Made by the app | 2025 | no | yes |
Apple added ID3 support around 2018 and the rest with iOS 26.2 in December 2025. Vorbis chapters use a comment convention with no single dated spec; support is on our list. Dates are when each format appeared, not when apps adopted it.